Time Is on My Side

I am, at my core, a person who needs a finish line. Hand me a goal and a timeline that ends somewhere I can actually point at, and I will happily grind toward it for as long as it takes. It’s the open-ended stuff that undoes me. “It heals when it heals” is, to my planner’s brain, a small horror. So when this gorgeous little chart came scrolling across my feed, I may have made a noise usually reserved for finding the last size in the sale rack.

Behold: healing, laid out in swimlanes like the world’s least thrilling relay race. I’ve circled our four lanes of interest — LIGAMENT, TENDON, BONE, and SKIN — and, as of today, I am officially crutching into the 5-7 WEEKS column. Not sprinting. Crutching. But moving.

No surprises in the two lanes that matter most. The LIGAMENT (my long-suffering spring ligament) and the TENDON (the FDL they rerouted up the inside of my ankle to do the ligament’s old job) both settle firmly into that 9-12 months bracket. Which, frankly, is exactly what my body pulled last time too. So I know the shape of this road: it is long, it is winding, and it does NOT, I repeat, resolve in time for any hypothetical 2027 race calendar I am absolutely, definitely, cross-my-heart not looking at. (I’m not. Stop asking. Fine, I glanced.)

Meanwhile, BONE and SKIN are out here being the overachievers of the group. Both are already knitting and regrowing, and the chart backs up what my surgeon promised: once I’m finally allowed to load the thing and go full weight-bearing, the bone should fuse up quick. Gold stars for the fast learners. The connective tissue can take notes.

So here’s the actual gift. It isn’t the timeline itself; I already lived a version of it once. It’s having the map out on the table again, color-coded and, dare I say, deeply profesh, so I can start pencilling in next year’s LIFE schedule. (Life. Just life. The kind with weddings and trips and standing upright at parties.) A roadmap that matches my own history, laid out like a design deck someone actually got paid for? That’s not just a chart. That’s permission to plan.

Tom Petty said the waiting was the hardest part and this beautiful chart dares to argue. The waiting is fine, actually, as long as there’s an itinerary. Nine to twelve months on the long lanes, a quick fuse on the short ones, and a finish line I can finally point to. Time isn’t the enemy here. For once, it’s on my side, and I’ve got the swimlanes to prove it.